—57—
For several years after the war, parts of me were so crushed that I could not find my painterly voice.
In the shed at Nina’s, I painted my memories but more as sketches of all that was lost than works of finished art.
I piled them up, canvas after canvas of small domestic things I was unwilling to show the world.
My confidence disappeared. I was adrift and unhappy and drinking in the evenings with our small band of survivors.
We all drank too much. Our souls had been twisted and tortured, and we took refuge in gin while we desultorily played backgammon and rummy and bezique.
Or more truthfully, we pretended to feast, just as we pretended to return to ordinary days.
Talwarpur Palace
[In Urdu]
Dear Elsie,
I have important news to share. My pen hovers over the page, as I know how hard this will land with you, but there is no other way to say it:
I am to be married. My bride shall bring a dowry to replenish the starved coffers of Talwarpur, and, of course, that is much required.
She is the daughter of a local raja with far more land than we enjoy, and the savvy to manage it.
We share a view of the future, and our unity will be politically smart.
At another time, she would have been a brilliant catch, and I could not have hoped to negotiate a marriage to her, for she was much in demand.
Two years ago, she was attacked by robbers on the way to Lahore.
Her servants were killed, and she was brutally beaten, then left by the side of the road.
Her health understandably has suffered, and her injuries left her unmarriageable.
She is quite intelligent and well educated, and has a clever sense of humor.
I do not marry her out of pity, but out of a need to make an alliance with someone I can trust to be honest, and with whom I can be entirely myself.
I have been as honest with her as I am able, Elsie, about our long friendship.
I have not told her everything, of course, for that is our private treasure, and I shall keep it for my own.
It was always going to come to this. I am grateful for your wisdom in this matter, but I also pray that you do not desert this good friendship between us, for I do not know how I would live without it.
Your friend eternally,
Tanveer
Although I had known it was coming, I was utterly crushed by the news of Tanveer’s marriage. In some bizarre twist of alliances, the only person I wished to share my grief with was Tanveer himself, which, of course, was impossible.
Instead, I walked endlessly, for miles and miles on the public footpaths that looped across the entire countryside.
I wept and walked and walked and cursed.
I was raw and exhausted, completely dependent upon Nina for a roof over my head.
Peter and I gave each other comfort at times, sex halting for an hour the darkness of both our memories.
He was a surprisingly skilled and imaginative lover, and the pleasure gave me a kind of hope I hadn’t anticipated.
Peter first phrased his proposals with that in mind, mutual solace and pleasure, as well as a path out of my dilemma. I refused, for months. What could he possibly gain from such a match?
After a time, he changed his suit, saying he would happily gain a beautiful wife for the enjoyment of seeing me paint and find myself again.
I was by then nearly twenty-seven. The only man I’d wanted was married to another woman. In another era, I would have been declared a spinster, but there were so few men and so many women my age that the usual shame associated with that status had been nullified.
It was a desire for children that swayed me in the end, and a desire to see to the support of my mother, who’d also been left penniless with my brother’s death. I wanted shelter, craved hope, for both of us.
And yet, I feared he would mistake my motives. “You know I don’t love you.”
“I know. I like to think you might over time.”
“What if I don’t?”
He laughed. “Well, then, we’ll just be another British couple, making do.”
In the end, he was given a posting to Cairo. He made one last bid for marriage, offering me studio space wherever we lived, and full support of my mother.
I agreed. We were married in a small ceremony just before we sailed. I began to look toward the future for the first time in at least two years.
Cairo blew a bright, strong wind through the darkness of my soul.
I awakened to the hot white light of the desert and the hard blue skies, the thronging humanity in the markets and backstreets, which I wandered regularly, sketchbook in hand, dupatta over my head.
Peter insisted I be accompanied by a servant at all times, which I adjusted to quickly enough, and she proved to be a great companion.
Once she saw that I wanted to paint everything, she led me to mosques and churches and bazaars off the main colonial routes.
Egyptians were weary of colonial occupation, too, but I discovered that if one was respectful, if I wore a scarf over my hair and spoke a few words of Arabic, it went a long way toward facilitating friendships.
Not that I made the mistake I had as a child in India.
I knew I did not belong, even if I loved it.
We traveled keenly, on the Nile, and to explore sites of antiquities, and somehow the ancientness of history eased me, too. People had survived dark times before, and we would again.
A new voice emerged in my painting. I copied classic styles to paint ordinary women in ordinary pursuits—sisters laughing as they walked to market in the luminous alleyways, a grandmother with only her laughing eyes and sliver of mouth showing over her scarf.
I painted English women sweating and red faced in the heat of a hotel garden, and a mother plaiting her daughter’s hair, both of them freckled and a bit gap toothed.
I showed a group of the paintings at a local English gallery, and all but one sold the first day.
Perhaps I’d finally found something authentic to myself.
Encouraged, I sketched women at household tasks around the city, and sketched the settings of their lives.
The stove on the floor, the pot on the stove, a pile of carrots and the knife that cut them.
I painted my own domestic life, as well—kitchens, tables, gardens with forgotten tools.
And then more intimate—a towel on a rack, with a pair of slippers and a discarded skirt on the floor.
An unmade bed with only one side slept on.
One of the women I’d become friends with commented, “Every painting is so lonely, Elsie. Why don’t you paint happier things?”
Others must have shared my loneliness, however, for they sold as fast as I could paint them.
I developed a language of intimacy that sometimes was too deep for the conservative Cairo market, and I began to set those aside for a London show.
A window with an opened letter on a table below it.
A road leading into the distance. A book in Urdu on an armchair, an empty cup of tea beside it.
We had been there for two years before Peter had his first episode.
He had continued to drink a great deal, but so did most of the diplomatic corps.
Gin was the language of the foreign office, and he partook as heavily as everyone else.
When he grew sloppy in public, I got him home and into bed without much incident.
He often tried to have sex with me at such times, which felt vaguely dangerous, but it was easy enough to slip away.
I always understood, from the very first time he proposed, that there was a risk he might end up being very unhappy in a marriage with me.
I’d talked it over at length with my mother and Nina, dissecting the reality that while I enjoyed his company and had found him an agreeable lover during those lost days after the war when we were all trying simply to recover, I would never likely love him.
My mother said that I would get over my attachment to Tanveer over time. It was young love, first love, and would fade. Nina simply said no one is ever happy in marriage—one did one’s best.
The first couple of years in Cairo, all was well. I painted with new vigor, and Peter liked his position and his superiors, and we made expeditions to the ancient sites he so loved.
Two years in, he was mugged in the street on the way home by a band of thieves who beat him and stole his father’s watch. He staggered home with blood on his shirt and an eye that was swollen shut, but it seemed minor. Such things happened.
Except that shortly afterward, he began to have nightmares of such vividness I found it difficult to sleep next to him for the thrashing.
He never wished to discuss what he dreamed.
I, remembering Tanveer’s torturous memories, did not push.
I did ask the physician for a sleeping draught, but that seemed to make things worse, for he would not leave drink alone, and the combination would knock him sideways.
He’d wake up not entirely himself, flailing about in a fog of insensibility.
The first time he attacked me was in the early morning hours after such a night, when he had begun fighting invisible monsters, yelling and throwing things.
I tried to soothe him, and he turned on me, flinging me down on the bed and holding me down.
I thought he might strangle me, but I managed to roll away and get out of the room.
When morning came, he was abjectly sorry but remembered very little of it.
I refused to sleep in the same room with him after that.
Mostly, in the daytime, he was himself, if a bit more hungover than he had been.
His supervisor, seeing Peter’s ragged health, sent him to England for a few weeks to recover, and I went with him, taking paintings to London to see if I might find a gallery.
Which I did, quite happily. It was a prestigious place, on St. James Street, and I promised to deliver a show by the end of the following spring.
The time in England calmed Peter, and we found an even footing once again. We returned to Cairo, me to my paintings, he to his work and archaeological digs.
He was not, however, the Peter I’d come to know. He brooded more, drank more. When he was in his cups, sex was sometimes so rough I was wary of it at all, so intimacy between us dropped. He complained about it but would not moderate his drinking.
There was an incident at a brothel that was swept under the rug, but I gathered he’d had an episode after falling asleep with a girl, and she’d barely escaped injury.
And yet, I was happy in Cairo. I painted the best I had in years.
I read deeply on many subjects and made friends among both the expats and continentals and Egyptian artists.
After a hiatus of more than a year after our marriages, Tanveer and I had recommenced our friendly, intellectual letters.
If my marriage was less than ideal, it was not appreciably worse than many others.
Peter’s troubles were an illness. I tried many ways to help him bleed the boil, as Tanveer had done in Herewich with his writing and walking, but Peter was inclined toward neither. His condition continued to worsen.
After a terrible night of his nightmares and the omnipresent fear of his delusions, I finally asked for help from the one person who might have insight into the problem.